


hold on for your life

by kittymills



Series: Sheith Snippets [10]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Fix It Fic, M/M, Post S7, SHEITH - Freeform, canonverse, keith sees visions of the future in the quantum abyss, leakgate
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-28
Updated: 2018-10-28
Packaged: 2019-08-08 09:43:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16426976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittymills/pseuds/kittymills
Summary: Nothing he can do will fix the past, but everything he does now will change his future.





	hold on for your life

**Author's Note:**

> it turns out the leaks upset me more than i realized but it's always been my hc that Keith and Krolia saw a lot more future flashes during their time in the abyss so i wrote myself a fix it fic (not that I'll need it, right??)

He hasn’t thought about that flash since they returned to Earth.

How did slip from his mind? It should have been burned into the grey matter of his brain, picked apart and shoved in deep. That image, that moment in time paused like a photograph from a reality he refused to believe was his own.

He tells himself there is nothing to concern himself with, nothing to worry about. It’s a future that will never be, a future that that won’t ever come to pass.

Except, now Keith stands in the shadow of the Garrison, hot desert wind whipping through his hair and he’s here.

He’s here. In front of them, and Keith feels the spinning pull of gravity trying to force him into the dirt.

The space wolf, pressed against his leg suddenly whines, and Krolia snaps her head sideways to pin her son with a look.

It’s a look full of silent warning, of command. Of urgency and tinted with the yellow egdes of fear.

_Do not let this reality come to pass,_ her eyes say.

Keith swallows and tries to calm the thunder of his heart as Shiro’s smile turns welcoming to the newcomer. Shiro is always warm, always kind, but this is different. This is Shiro’s eyes lighting up with a long-forgotten memory and a name Keith hasn’t heard before slides out of Shiro’s mouth.

This man isn’t a stranger to Shiro. They are friends, from years ago. Before Kerberos, before Voltron.

“Keith,” Krolia murmurs. Her clawed hand curls around his bicep and squeezes tight.

“I know,” he hisses back. “I know, mom.”

“Those futures are not set in stone,” she reminds him. And he knows. He knows this. He knows because the flash that had him releasing Shiro’s broken body into the churning atmosphere of the planet below hadn’t come to pass.

He hadn’t let go then. And he won’t now.

“Shiro,” Keith steps forward, and the two men turn to him. Shiro’s smile becomes even warmer, as it always does when he looks at Keith. Keith tucks it up and holds it close to his heart.

“Keith, you won’t believe who it is,” Shiro says breathlessly. He’s happy and bright and Keith digs his nails into his palms. “I should have known the galra wouldn’t have been able to kill this guy.”

Keith tastes something like bile at the back of his throat as he watches. Shiro grips the other man’s hand pumps it once in a brisk shake. The other man grins back, even laughing as he pulls Shiro in for a hug that Shiro warmly returns.

Keith watches Shiro keenly, every nuance, every touch. Searching for that fledgling promise that would bloom into memory. That vision of Shiro in a white tux, of this man beside him as they kiss slides behind Keith’s mind’s eye once again and his throat burns.

For a fraction of a second, his eyes glow yellow and a snarl claws at the back of his throat.

_No,_ Keith thinks. _You can’t have him._

* * *

It’s well into the late-night hours when Keith raps against Shiro’s door. He doesn’t pause for an answer, not when he’s done this a hundred times before, on a hundred other nights. They have the same easy intimacy they’ve always had. Shiro’s door always open to him, always welcoming.

He walks inside and Shiro smiles at him in a way that lights him up from the inside.

“Hi.”

“I need to talk to you,” Keith says without finesse, without warmth. Shiro doesn’t even blink at this brusqueness.

“Alright,” he says slowly, his lip quirking into something rueful. He looks like he’s bracing himself. “What’s on your mind?”

Keith glances around the room once, noticing for the first time then that the lights are dimmed and Shiro is adorned in his white tank and soft sleep pants. It made sense. It was late, and Shiro was getting ready for bed.

Keith hesitates for one beat, then two before the image flashes up in his mind once again and he sucks in a breath to steady himself. It’s not enough when he considers what he needs to say and one hand reaches back, searching out the smooth, cool lines of the wall a moment before he slumps back against it.

His jaw kind of aches, tight with the tension he’s held under his skin all day, through each tedious meeting he half wonders how he didn’t snap and rip apart the entire room when yet another argument circled around and repeated itself.

Even two years on the back of a space whale with his mother wasn’t enough to provide him with the steady calm he needed to sit through the bureaucratic efforts needed to rebuild Earth and half the galaxy.

He forces himself to swallow. “In the quantum abyss, I saw things.”

Shiro’s smile falters as Keith knew it would. A frown lands there instead. “You saw our fight.”

Keith nods once. “Yes.” 

They’d talked about it once, hashed out the entire fight over hours in Black’s belly on the long way back to Earth. Long hours of Keith gripping Shiro’s hand as tightly as Shiro gripped his and tears ran in silver rivers down their cheeks in the dark.

Keith swallows and hopes that Shiro can’t see sudden tremor in his hands. “But I saw something else too.”

Shiro looks wary now. He leaves the datapad discarded on the bed behind him and approaches Keith with slow steps but pauses just beyond his reach.

“Okay,” he says. his smile completely faded and his brows bunch in something that looks like concern. “Tell me.”

“There were other flashes. Memories, glimpses of the future. Some where hazy, some were clear. Some… Some I’m not even sure belonged to me, maybe to some alternate reality version of me. But there was one that I remembered only today. Only after I saw you with him.”

Shiro watches him silently but there’s the slightest flinch of surprise when Keith says those words.

“You were getting married. To _him.”_

A pin drop of silence fills the room, an empty, painful silence that forces the memory of that image back behind Keith’s eyes in vivid, technicolour detail. He hates it.

He hates the way Shiro doesn’t ask him to clarify too. Something about that stings, although he doesn’t care in that moment to analyse why.

“I see,” Shiro answers thoughtfully. His brows bunch and for a horrifying, dizzying moment, Keith wonders if he’s just struck his own death knell, if he’s just planted the seat of a possibility that Shiro had never considered before and that now Shiro might look at the newcomer with a fresh perspective.

The thought leaves him breathless with discomfort. It feels like an age has passed before either of them speak again, and when they do, it’s Shiro. His voice guarded but there’s a lightness to it that Keith doesn’t expect.

“You know, it’s kind of hard to date when you’re the Captain of the Atlas and the current leader of Earth,” Shiro muses after the silence stretches too deep. “Far too busy for romance.”

Something itches at the back of Keith’s mind. Shiro was treating this too lightly. This notion, this possible future without him makes Keith feel sick. It makes his gut churn and nausea claw at his throat.

And he knows that Shiro must know that.

“Well, apparently not,” Keith mutters with a huff. It comes out petulant, vaguely irritated and Keith isn’t sure if he should be heartened by the dismissive way Shiro treats it, or if he’s hit on something that might spell happiness in Shiro’s future.

He’s startled instead when Shiro suddenly laughs. It’s a bright, booming sound that wraps around his heart like a vice and squeezes so tight. He misses that sound. He _lives_ for that sound.

“Keith, if I dated, I’d need to date someone who understands my schedule.”

Keith glances away under the pressure of Shiro’s measured gaze but he can still feel the weight of his intensity. He licks his lips in an effort to stall. “Yeah.”

Shiro takes a step forward. He’s close enough now that the blue glow of his shoulder washes over Keith’s face. The floating arm hovers by his hip.

“Someone,” Shiro continues. “Who understands the pressures of leadership like I do.”

Keith doesn’t look up, instead dropping his gaze to the floor only to realise the soft cotton sleep pants Shiro wears hides very little.

“Uh, huh.”

The floating arm lands softly against Keith’s hip and it’s warm and smooth and so damn big. Shiro’s head dips down, the movement so slight that Keith feels it more than sees it.

“Someone who understands the responsibility we have, what’s expected of us.”

It takes a moment longer than it should for him to follow Shiro’s words but he swallows past the lump in his throat.

“Mm.”

Shiro’s human hand slides under his chin, gently tilting Keith’s chin up until their gazes lock. He can’t quite read the intensity in Shiro’s eye right now. The line of his lips had been soft before, curved around his laugh but now they’re straight and unyielding.

“Someone,” Shiro goes on with an unexpected force to his tone. “Who understands what I’ve been through, who will be there for me when I need it.”

Of course, Keith thinks. It’s what you deserve.

He goes to nod his head again, until he realises Shiro’s fingers are still gently propping up his jaw.

“Yes,” he whispers, and a sudden heat pools low in his stomach at the way Shiro stares at Keith’s lips with something akin to hunger.

“Someone who understands the strain that commanding a partially sentient, magical transforming ship can take-“

It takes longer than it should to understand where Shiro is going with this. All at once, Keith’s nerves dissipate, leaking out of him like vapour to fade into nothingness under the touch on his jaw and the touch on his hip.

He shouldn’t doubt Shiro. He shouldn’t doubt _them._

He takes a breath and tilts his head. This time it’s his lips that twitch.

“So… I guess someone like Lance or Hunk then?”

Shiro’s mouth drops open in a small O, just before his shoulders curl in and he lets out a warm, heavy laugh. His body vibrates his chuckles and the intensity he’d carried just a few moments before loosens itself into humour. He drops his hand from Keith’s jaw, only to settle it on Keith’s other hip.

“Unbelievable,” Shiro presses their foreheads together when the tremors stop. “The cheek of it.”

Keith laughs, just a soft breathless sound that unfurls the tight band around his heart that he had been carrying around the moment Shiro’s old friend walked onto the base. He fights down his smile and feigns innocence.

“Hmm. Who then?”

Shiro shifts closer, until Keith is pressed against the wall with the weight of him. He doesn’t bother to hold back now, surging up to seize Shiro’s jaw in his palms. He presses his mouth against Shiro’s in a greedy kiss that skirts close to biting.

Shiro tastes like coffee and mint and all the things good in the world.

“You,” Shiro breathes the word against his mouth. Keith closes his eyes and drinks it in. “Only you.”

“Me,” Keith repeats but a beat passes and the memory still lurks, ready to spring from the recess of his mind. Ready to douse him in guilt. It burns.

It must show on his face because Shiro pulls back just enough to brush a finger over the outline of the scar on his cheek.

“I think I know what might set your mind at ease.”

Keith’s dark brows inch closer together. “Yeah? And what’s that?”

“Marry me instead.”

The air rushes out of Keith’s lungs with a whoosh. The words are a caress. An invitation, a whirlpool of Shiro’s love for him and it never fails to shock him just how badly he wants it. Shiro’s hand threads through his hair, over the line of his jaw and the column of his throat before it settles on his shoulder.  

Keith can’t find his voice, his mouth silently working in surprise.

“Marry me, Keith. What are we waiting for anyway? We’ve been through so much, we’ve fought so hard for this. For what we have. There’s no one else who can love me like you do, no one else I could ever see myself with. Let’s make it official. Make it _our_ wedding you see-“

“Yes,” Keith cuts him off with a breathless laugh, pulling him in and kissing him deeply and this time the memory behind his eyes shift, flitting through their history, of their soft moments, their friendship, the battles they’ve fought, their passion, of the way they’d saved each other and would keep on saving each other.

“Yes,” he repeats and Shiro laughs again as he kisses him.

* * *

The news spreads quickly.

Keith had been reluctant to wait and Shiro was just as eager. The wedding band sits on his finger, proudly displayed for now. Later, he’ll tuck it under his gloves but it will always be there, resting against his skin.

The Captain of the Atlas and the Leader of Voltron, a partnership that saved each other and the universe and equals who loved each whole heartedly.

“You held onto him,” his mother says to him in a quiet moment days later. At his side, Kosmo licks his hand.

He meets her gaze calmly.

“I didn’t let go. I won’t ever let go. And now he’s mine forever.”


End file.
